This past year, I got into period pieces, by which I mean I watched several Jane Austen movies for the first time. I watched both the miniseries and film versions of Pride and Prejudice (miniseries is superior), Sense and Sensibility (during a Hugh Grant marathon), the 2020 version of Emma, and Persuasion. I like the elaborate costumes and the silly ways of talking (I absolutely love when they ask each other to “take a turn about the room”). I like how the main activity in people's lives seems to be going over to each other’s houses and hanging out and then gossiping about it later (my favorite activity).
The HBO show The Gilded Age has some of these qualities, in that it’s a period piece and it spends a lot of time in rich people’s homes. It’s all set in New York during the Gilded Age, a phrase that is to high school history class as mitochondria is to science class. It’s a time period when women wore huge skirts and feathered hats, when people rode in fancy carriages and had servants draw a bath for them. It’s a time with a lot of railroad-building and other technology we no longer care about. It’s a time after the end of slavery when forms of slavery still existed, but also there was a thriving Black upper class in New York, which this show portrays for roughly five minutes every episode.
The Gilded Age is made by Julian Fellowes, the same dude who made Downton Abbey (I watched one episode and it was the series finale), and he loves the whole upstairs-downstairs structure. I didn’t know anything about Julian Fellowes until just now when I Googled him and his Wikipedia is so British I can barely understand it. For example, this sentence is illegible:
Fellowes was elevated to the peerage, being created Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, of West Stafford in the County of Dorset, and on the same day was introduced in the House of Lords, where he sits on the Conservative Benches.
With some more Googling I learned that this means Fellowes is a Tory, plus he supported Brexit. Well you’ve gotta be a bit of a freak to make a period piece like this.
In The Gilded Age, doesn’t have one singular plot line, but follows the lives of wealthy New York socialites and businessmen, the people who work for them, and the all the romance, drama, and general shenanigans that come along with it. The scenes are split between the wealthy high society people and the servants who cater to them, but mostly it focuses on the rich people. It’s not representative of how the majority of people lived their lives back then, but it is more fun to watch than the reality (I don’t know enough about this era of history to really analyze its politics). These people are silly and so is almost everything they do and say. I’m hooked!
Here are some reasons that The Gilded Age is good.
Wigs and Costumes
Every single socialite, handmaiden, and butler on The Gilded Age is wearing a wig. And every single actor looks like they’re wearing a wig. There are some actors who just look too modern to be in a period piece. Jennifer Lawrence, for example, does not look like someone who could be alive in 1904. Imagine Jennifer Lawrence playing a phonograph (you can’t). A lot of the actors in this show have this effect, particularly Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon, who both wear updos that they occasionally unravel to reveal rapunzel hair. These are two women who I have never previously seen with long hair.
The show also stars Louisa Jacobson, nee Louisa Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep. It’s a hilarious move to change your name, not because you share it with your acting mom, but because you share it with two sisters who already have middling acting careers. Louisa went to Yale Acting school, which you can tell because she acts like a theater student.
Every dress has a bustle skirt. The dresses have frills and bows and lace and corsets. They look like they each took 300 hours to make and weigh 40 pounds. The men all wear 8 piece suits and have little chains holding a pocket watch like the Monopoly man. (These are obviously the costumes of the rich people. The servants and the like either dress like nuns or Little House on the Prairie.) Everyone of all classes wears silly little hats.
Sometimes the costumes look period-appropriate, and other times they look like the costume designers were just having fun with it, which is perfectly fine with me.
Gossip
I love gossip and I will never stop! I love gossip about celebrities, coworkers, friends of friends, total strangers I just met. I will listen to anyone’s gossip. The Gilded Age runs on gossip. For the wealthy women who don’t have “real” jobs, gossip is how they plan their parties and fundraisers and luncheons. Some of their favorite locations to gossip include the parlor, the drawing room, in a horse-drawn carriage, in an empty hallway, and in the servant’s kitchen.
Some favorite topics of gossip include Mrs. Chamberlain, a very rich widow who is shunned because she was a mistress who had a child out of wedlock; how Mrs. Russell is so rich but has no friends; how one of the Russells’ servants is hated by the other servants because she’s a gold digger; Nathan Lane looking like a Yankee Colonel Sanders.
Carrie Coon and her hot husband
In this show, Carrie Coon has an accent I can’t really describe except that it’s incredible. She wears the biggest and frilliest dresses of them. She’s also a huge bitch to everyone except her hot husband George Russell. Russell is played by Morgan Spector, an actor I’ve never seen until this show. He has a very dense beard and a well placed mole and a smile like a hot Cheshire cat. I looked up his Wikipedia and learned he’s Jewish which makes sense because I’ve seen his face.
George Russell is so hot that a servant named Ms. Turner, who looks exactly like his wife, climbs into his bed fully nude in the middle of the night to try and seduce him. But George rejects her because he LOVES his wife (she helped him deal with Jamie Taco). At least once an episode, Carrie Coon says something like “we are rich and powerful and always will be” and then her husband says “I’ll be rich as long as I have you (and a railroad empire).” It’s nice that they have the hots for each other because it counters the fact that they’re the greediest people on earth.
They also have a daughter played by Taissa Farmiga, who is 27 but has the face of a 9-year old.
I can’t wait to watch the next episode where Christine Baranski and Carrie Coon have a contest to see who can be a bigger bitch.